Angela Smith: I am in some ways, as many organisations have had the help and have been able to make use of it. I think that more can be done, however, and I appeal to all Members to make organisations in their constituencies aware of the grants, support and loans that are available. We want that money to get out to third sector organisations because they are often the glue in communities, providing support on the ground to the people who most need it. We must do as much as we can to get that money out to them and to help and support them. May I direct my hon. Friend to the Government-funded National Council for Voluntary Organisations website, "Funding central", which has all the information on grants and support? That is helpful to all organisations.

Tom Clarke: On the subject of diversity, may I be the first to congratulate my hon. Friend on being the first black woman ever to have spoken from the Dispatch Box? My I encourage her and her colleagues to work with excellent organisations such as Mencap and People First to ensure that people with learning disabilities are given the opportunity to play a full part in voluntary activity, which is both in their interests and the greater interest of society?

David Cameron: The Prime Minister is right: of course it is for military commanders to make the precise dispositions. But everyone agrees that one of the keys to successful counter-insurgency is a dense population of troops to protect the civilian population, and the figures tell a vital story. Soon, 20,000 US forces will be responsible for some 30 per cent. of the population, and less than 10,000 British troops will be responsible for some 70 per cent. So let me just ask him again: how quickly does he think that this vital issue can be sorted out, so that we have effective counter-insurgency throughout southern Afghanistan?

Gordon Brown: This is a matter for the Members Estimate Committee to make a judgment on. The shadow Leader of the House is a member of the Members Estimate Committee, as is the Leader of the House. We want the maximum transparency possible. I believe there is nothing that we have to hide, and we have got to get all the information out. Anything that maximises transparency is what I support, but I would I have thought that the details of how we do it are best left to the Members Estimate Committee, and it is for the shadow Leader of the House to put his views there. I think, if I am right, that we were trying to reach a consensus about how we would move forward on these issues. I think we should all say that the sooner we can deal with all the issues the better, but the best way of dealing with them is by the process that we ourselves agreed.

David Cameron: With respect, the question of whether you publish the totals is not a matter of detail; it seems to me pretty profound. You have got to publish the totals so that the public can see that we are being open, transparent and straightforward about this issue that has done so much damage to this House.
	After the Queen's Speech- [ Interruption. ]

Vincent Cable: I thank the Chancellor for sending me his statement, even though it was missing 43 paragraphs.
	What is clear from the statement is that the economic position of the country is still very grave. We know now that we are 5 per cent. poorer than we were a year ago, and that the Government estimates of borrowing for this year and next year are higher than even they had forecast. What we needed was a national economic plan, but what we have got is an election manifesto.
	There have been genuinely great Labour Chancellors in the past-Stafford Cripps and Roy Jenkins, among others-but they would not have been obsessed, as the Chancellor is today, with drawing tactical dividing lines. There are small things that one welcomes, such as initiatives on jobs for young people, on technology and on environmental policies. This is a good Budget for bingo and boilers; I think that is what it boils down to.
	The underlying problem, however, is that for the past decade or more, the British Government have been over-dependent for their revenues on the fickle fortunes of the banking industry. We have had an economy that has been built on sand-on the assumption that property prices rise for ever, and on consumer borrowing-and the economy is now being rebuilt on sand, because the only signs of real recovery that we have are rising house prices and booming bank profits at a time when industry is continuing to decline.
	Let me speak specifically about the banks. The Chancellor has clearly been provoked into action by the extraordinarily stupid and arrogant behaviour of the RBS board. What he has come up with, to the extent that it is intelligible, is an extraordinarily complex mechanism. Will he explain precisely how he will stop the banks converting their bonuses into basic salary? He talks about avoidance measures, but how is he going to stop that? Will he give us a worked example of what it means in reality?
	Let us take as an example Mr. Bob Diamond of Barclays Capital, who has just walked away with £27 million on the back of a taxpayer guarantee. How would that be affected by the Government's proposal? Surely it makes more sense, as I think the Prime Minister entertained when he went to the G20 summit, not to try to tax bankers separately from other high earners, but to have a levy on bank profits because the banks depend on a taxpayer guarantee. Until they can be broken up and can stand on their own two feet, they have to pay for the insurance that the taxpayer provides.
	The heart of the Chancellor's statement was about the borrowing requirement and the long-term problem of the structural deficit. What we needed was a clear, long-term way of dealing with this problem. What we had, to the extent to which we can understand the early statement that he made, was that there is an increase in tax-approximately £6 billion to £7 billion a year-much of which will be in the form of national insurance. Let us be clear about what will now happen. Any worker earning more than £7,000 a year will pay 32 per cent. marginal income tax and 12 per cent. national insurance contributions. All the money raised in additional tax will go to public spending, and none will be used to pay down the borrowing requirement and the deficit. That is a complete distortion of the priorities that the Government should surely have.
	In respect of timing, it is obviously right that we heed the advice of the Governor of the Bank of England and others that, if the economy is continuing to stagnate, it makes no sense to embark on rapid cuts in public expenditure and reducing the deficit. That is the problem that the Conservatives have got themselves into, but it is also right that, if there is rapid growth, the Government must get on with dealing with the deficit. What the Government have assumed today is that there will be high rates of economic growth-3.5 per cent. in 2011-but what is the basis for that assumption?
	It is a little like the old story of the economist who is given a tin of food to eat and says, "Let's assume the existence of a tin opener." The Government are saying, "Let's assume economic growth." Why? Have they made any estimate of the very real risk that the economy will revert to a double-dip recession or continue to stagnate? What is the risk of those things happening-is it one in 10, one in five, or one in two? Surely we cannot operate on the basis of a single-line forecast that is based entirely on optimism and very little else.
	To the extent that we can understand what the Government are doing about cutting public spending growth, it comes down to two items. Perhaps the Chancellor will confirm that. One of the items involves hitting low-paid workers by cutting the proposal for personal allowances, which I understand has been postponed or deferred. The other is the approach adopted to public sector pay. On the assumption that the Govt have made, a 1 per cent. increase for a low-paid manual worker is a real cut. Of course, it is worth 10 times as much for a permanent secretary on £150,000 a year as it is to a worker on £15,000 a year. If there is to be restraint-and we have argued for it-surely it should be a flat sum across the board. We have argued that it should be £8 a week for everyone. That is the heart of the issue of fairness, which the Chancellor claimed was at the heart of his statement.
	Of course it is right that we should be concerned with fairness in the tax system and in public spending priorities. The hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) keeps saying that we are all in this together, but that is simply not right: we are not all in this together, as some people have done much better than others.
	The Government's claims to fairness are absolutely bogus. The Chancellor's big, totemic step of the last year was to introduce a 50 per cent. tax rate, but he has delivered a gift-wrapped invitation to tax avoidance by keeping capital gains tax at 18 per cent. He had an opportunity today to deal with that, but he has done absolutely nothing about it. Unless there is fairness, the public will not accept the fact that, for the next five years or longer, there is going to be a real hard slog for the economy. The Chancellor has not set out the way forward that we need.

Steve Webb: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that very important point. The Bill measures income, including housing benefits and so forth, but takes no account of the impact of housing costs coming out of that income. Many households are in poverty, and if one compares the statistics on income before housing costs and after housing costs, the poverty rate is much higher on the after-housing-costs measure. It is interesting that he should raise that question, because the general assumption is that taking account of housing costs is an urban issue that relates to big cities with high housing costs, but it is clearly relevant in areas such as his, where housing costs can also take a big part of people's incomes.
	Housing costs are a big part of household budgets, and people often have quite limited choices in that regard. It could be argued, "Well, if you have big housing costs it's because you live in a big house. You have chosen a higher living standard, so why should we deduct your housing costs? That would be like deducting your caviar expenditure. You've chosen to spend more and you're better off as a result, so we shouldn't deduct it." However, the reality, particularly for many people in rural areas or others with low means, is that housing is not one of those things that they shop around for, like wondering what tin of beans to buy this week. People in poverty often have very constrained choices about housing, so the level of housing expenditure is not discretionary in the way that spending on a luxury item would be. It really is a necessity, and people have very constrained choices and have to live with the consequences of making them. Assessing income after housing costs have been met would give us another facet. I am not suggesting that it is the only way of looking at things, but it is an additional way.
	The second reason why this is important is that the regional impact of housing costs varies considerably, and if we look only at income before housing costs, we do not capture that. Obviously, on average, housing costs will be substantially higher in London and certain other housing hotspot areas. One of the perverse aspects of the measure of income before housing costs is that it includes housing benefit. If that is the only measure we have, we end up with the strange situation where somebody with a huge rent that is being met wholly or largely by housing benefit seems to be relatively well off because all that housing benefit is included in their income, but no account is taken of the fact that it has an equal and opposite cost on the other side of the equation. That bit would never get measured under the Bill as it stands.
	Let us take as an example two pensioner households living next door to each other, both with identical pension income. One person has paid off their mortgage and owns their house outright, and the other is on housing benefit and getting their rent paid in full. On the before-housing-costs measure, the person with the housing benefit is much better off than their neighbour because they have housing benefit, but after housing costs they are both in the same position because they just have their pension once they have met their housing costs. Clearly, the measure we propose provides a fairer assessment of relative living standards than saying that the person on housing benefit is better off. Indeed, one could argue that the person who owns their house outright is better off, because they have an asset, from which one might impute an income. The before-housing-costs measure puts people the wrong way round in that sense, so it is not an ideal definition.
	I mentioned in response to the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) that poverty is greater after housing costs than before them. That is not a reason to put it in the figures, but it demonstrates that, once income including housing benefit is measured, housing costs are seen to take up a bigger proportion of the incomes of the poor than of the rich, which is an important facet of measuring people's poverty.
	We want reliable measures over time. My hon. Friend mentioned the problem of rent inflation. It has been the policy of successive Governments to deregulate social rents, so they have risen far faster than inflation for many years. If we only use the before-housing-costs measure, that makes people appear better off, because their housing benefit shoots up every time their rent does. That seems perverse in the extreme. If we measure income after housing costs, we will strip out the effect of rental inflation, which, as he said, has been very significant. There are strong reasons for having the additional target-it would give us a new lens through which to view child poverty without taking away from any of the existing measures, and it would catch an important facet of poverty.
	As I said, I have thought about the responses that Ministers might give. One might be, Well, we can't add another target to the Bill. We've got four targets, we can't have five. If they were to say, We've got four targets, we can't have 99, I would probably accept that, but we wish to add one additional target. Why do the Government have four, and not three or two? Each target needs to stand on its own feet as an important indicator of poverty and give us new insights that we would not get without it. That should be the test of each target in Bill. As I said in Committee, I believe that the absolute low income target could go. If we could have only four, I would take that one out, but there seems no substantive reason why five good targets that provide a more comprehensive measure of poverty are worse than four. It is a difference not of kind but of degree, and given the added value of the after-housing-costs measures, the additional target is justified.
	When we discussed the matter in Committee, Ministers said, Ah, yes, but housing is in the Bill. You don't need to worry, it is already covered. I apologise if I am running through the Minister's bullet points for her. The Bill does contain provisions on housing, such as the material deprivation measure, which contains a few questions about housing, but nothing that will capture the cost of housing as a measure of income after housing costs would. The difference between the poverty figures before and after housing costs is, as it says on the tin, all to do with housing costs. They should not be buried as a sub-factor in part of a measure. That is the problem. Although the material deprivation measure has a few housing-related matters in it, there are also a lot of non-housing matters. It would be incredibly difficult to strip out details of housing costs and be clear about whether they, rather than some other facet of material deprivation, were driving the figures. It will be as plain as a pikestaff that housing costs are causing the problem if we use figures for income after rather than before them.
	The Minister might say that housing costs are about housing quality. I hope that I addressed that point earlier. The two are not wholly uncorrelated, but they are not very well correlated. Higher housing costs are often the product of necessity and of the part of the country in which people live. Often, as many people who live in private rented accommodation would say, they are not a good proxy for the quality of housing. Deducting housing costs and having both before and after-housing-costs measures, so that one can assess their impact on the figures, therefore seems to us an entirely sensible approach.
	Drawing those threads together, the reason why there is not just one target in the Bill is that child poverty is multi-faced. The Government have alighted on four targets, but they could have alighted on three or five. Once one has accepted that there should be more than one, having five rather than four does not seem to make a substantive difference, and there is huge added value in the after-housing-costs approach.
	I shall briefly to address other amendments and new clauses in this group. I am sure that the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) will speak to new clause 2, which suggests that there should be
	reductions in the causes of poverty targets.
	I had to read that several times to work out where the pause came-I think it means reductions in the causes of poverty rather than in the targets. Clearly we should examine the causes of poverty, not just the outcomes. We discussed the matter in Committee, in the light of which the hon. Gentleman has obviously refined the new clause. I look forward to hearing him make the case for it. New clause 3 argues for an assessment of progress on the 2010 target. We supported the idea in Committee and anticipate doing so again.
	Amendments 33 and 34 were prompted by the discussions of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) may be planning to speak to them. They raise some important points about who counts as a child in a qualifying household and whether there are two tiers of children in the Bill. There are children who appear in the household surveys on which all the statistical data are based, and there are other children who come under the Bill's more general wording about deprivation but who are not covered by the statistical targets.
	I do not mean to be in any way critical of the Joint Committee, but in a sense it is easier to point out the problem than to work out what one should do about it. The Committee referred to Gypsy and Traveller children, some of whom are in the statistics because they live in households picked up in the surveys-for example, if they are on local authority or private Traveller sites. However, the most transient might not get picked up in the figures. It is incredibly difficult to think how one might meld them into the statistics, so although it is important that they are not treated as second-class children, I am not entirely sure how we can add them to a measure based on household equivalent income.
	Likewise, we discussed in Committee children who are in care. Their well-being is clearly crucial, but trying to measure the living standard of a child living in an institution, for example, is very difficult. A child being cared for in a private household, perhaps having been fostered, will be picked up in the normal statistical surveys, but it is difficult to identify the living standards of a child living in an institution whose meals are provided, but for whom there is no parental or household income that one can measure. It is difficult to know whether their income is 50 or 70 per cent. of the median, or how they could be melded into a living standard measure based on households. I am sure that my hon. Friend would accept that. The real question is whether there should be another statistical target or whether we should give greater weight to the parts of the Bill that refer more broadly to socio-economic disadvantage. I look forward to hearing his suggestions.
	New clause 1 need not divide us along party lines, and I welcome the support that the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) has given it. She was a member of the Public Bill Committee and is much respected on these issues, and she rightly believes that housing is a crucial aspect of living standards. I can understand why she would take that view as a London MP. I hope that all parties will support the new clause. I hope for a conciliatory response from the Minister, because I know that my noble Friends in another place attach great importance to housing costs and they will want to return to the matter if we cannot get a better measure into the Bill-one that would improve it and help the Bill to achieve the goal that we all share of ensuring that child poverty is abolished.

Andrew Selous: As always, it is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) and, indeed, the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), who ably introduced new clause 1. As the hon. Gentleman said, we touched on this issue in Committee and I understand where he is coming from. Indeed, in Committee I made the point that families are primarily interested in the after housing costs income-how much money they have left to spend on food, clothing, transport and so on, to balance the weekly budget. That is the critical amount for many families.
	We do track that figure. In Prime Minister's questions earlier, the figure of 4 million children living in poverty was mentioned, and that is the after housing cost figure, rather than the before housing cost figure of 2.9 million. In Committee, my hon. Friends and I backed amendment 28, tabled by the hon. Gentleman, which would have removed clause 6(2) which prevents housing costs from being deducted when calculating the net income of a household. We thought that that was overly prescriptive because it would tie the hands of the Child Poverty Commission, which has not even been set up yet, when it came to take a view on housing costs. We were happy to back the hon. Gentleman on that amendment.
	As the hon. Gentleman has made clear, the households below average income series already publishes the figures for both before and after housing costs, and it will continue to do so. The Minister made that clear. I assure the hon. Gentleman that we will pay careful attention to the after housing costs figure. At 4 million, it is much higher than any of us would like.
	My concern about supporting new clause 1 is that we already have four income targets in the Bill, as I said in Committee. I was grateful for the comments by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead when he talked of the importance of widening out the range of indicators and targets that we use to track our progress in reducing poverty, which will of course always be measured in income terms. We should have a range of targets in the Bill that drive policy in the right direction. My concern about new clause 1 is that that fifth income target would focus more on downstream intervention, whereas the real need is to focus on the root causes of poverty-those factors that trap people in a life of poverty, about which the right hon. Gentleman rightly talked. In that respect, I tabled new clause 2 and amendments 23 and 24.
	New clause 2 seeks to add a fifth target to the Bill, just as the hon. Member for Northavon has tried to do, that would deal specifically with reducing the causes of poverty. I tabled a similar amendment in Committee and made an attempt to put some detail in the clause. Other members of the Committee said, Well, you have included this, but you have left out that, and we do not think that that's very good. I took that point. I accept that the new clause is relatively brief at the moment, but amendment 23 specifies that the actual causes of poverty would be specified in regulations made by the Secretary of State. That is clearly something that the Child Poverty Commission, among others, would have a view on, and it would advise the Government. I think that that measure is essential. Indeed, my overriding criticism of the Bill is that it focuses purely on downstream income intervention and does not do enough at an early enough stage to address the causes of poverty.
	I am supported in that point by several commentators, not least by witnesses at the formal evidence sessions in Committee. For example, both Mike Brewer of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Donald Hirsch, a well respected academic from the university of Loughborough, were asked whether the Bill needs to address the longer-term causes of poverty in the early years, and they both said yes. Mike Brewer said:
	I wish that there were a broader range of indicators.
	That is precisely what new clause 2 is seeking to introduce. Neil O'Brien, another witness from Policy Exchange, spoke about the current set of targets driving public policy to
	relentlessly...downstream intervention to give people income, rather than...tackle the causes.
	He spoke of it being necessary to align
	your targets to your broader strategy.--[ Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 22 October 2009; c. 101-104, Q199 and 203.]
	That is the central point.
	The Department for Work and Pensions used to go some way along those lines. In its excellent Opportunity for All report, it published details of the number of children in workless households, teenage pregnancy, the proportion of children in disadvantaged areas with a good level of development, the number of children not in education, employment or training, childhood obesity and other such factors. Bizarrely, it stopped producing that report in 2007.
	I quoted Mike Brewer's evidence to the Committee, but he has not stopped considering the point. In a recent article entitled What's the point of the Child Poverty Bill?, he wrote that
	in my mind, the worrying aspect of the Bill is that it highlights income-based measures of child poverty over all other possible measures of child well-being. Although the Bill says that a government strategy must tackle socio-economic disadvantage amongst children, the way we will know whether child poverty is eradicated in 2020 will be determined by four measures of income poverty.
	He also points out that
	there is a risk that politicians will always favour policy responses with immediate and predictable impacts on the incomes of parents over responses which mitigate the impact of poverty on children, or improve poor children's well-being, or reduce the intergenerational transmission of child poverty (such as measures to tackle low achievement amongst white boys in receipt of free school meals, whose results at Key Stage 2 were recently revealed to be lower than all other ethnic groups).

Gary Streeter: My hon. Friend is on to a very good point. This is a question of what the Government focus on. This slightly contradicts the point that I made earlier. If we are serious about child poverty, we need to restructure Government Departments and align them so that they can bear down on the problem. My hon. Friend might ask why we should not do that in relation to elderly poverty or to deprivation of all kinds. Of course these are important issues.
	I have been in the House for 17 years. I believe that, for all sorts of reasons, the situation is now significantly worse-with the lack of social cohesion, with behaviour issues and the fact that so many children are now growing up in households of chaos-than when I first entered the House in 1992. I do not say that in any political sense. I would love to see whichever Government are in place after the next election focusing on this issue and really getting underneath the surface to try to tackle it.

Evan Harris: I rise to speak to amendments 33 and 34, tabled on behalf of the Joint Committee on Human Rights by me and the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), the Chairman of that Committee.
	The Joint Committee attempts-it generally succeeds-to analyse every piece of primary legislation that might engage human rights, and to issue a report for Parliament and the Government in which we make recommendations, particularly when we feel that the legislation has human rights compatibility issues; we also comment when the measures enhance human rights. We tend to do that before the Report stage of a Bill in the first House, to enable Parliament as a whole to consider our recommendations and debate the amendments. It is good to see the amendments being debated, although there is not always is time to do so on Report.
	The Joint Committee report was published on 10 November 2009. It makes it clear that the Committee welcomes the Bill and generally recognises it as a human rights enhancing measure. We also welcome the detail provided in the human rights memorandum that the Government supplied and the fact that the Government recognised, implicitly and explicitly, the role that the Bill can play in meeting our treaty obligations under the United Nations convention on the rights of the child and the United Nations convention on economic, social and cultural rights. It is good to have the opportunity to debate measures that show the value of our human rights commitments arising from the treaties and the Human Rights Act 1998, particularly in the light of the many attacks-usually based on myth-that are made on the Act in this House.
	The matter addressed by the Joint Committee's two amendments is that the principal duty set out in the Bill is to meet four targets defined by income-based indicators of poverty. They relate to children in what the Bill describes as qualifying households. Those are not defined in the Bill-they are to be defined by regulations-but it is clear that they will include households that are covered by certain surveys. The report states:
	The surveys currently used are based on the Small Users Postcode Address File, which includes most addresses which have postcodes and receive less than 50 items of post a day, and exclude addresses which are 'communal establishments or institutions'.
	That is where our concern arises. Children who do not live in qualifying households under that definition will not be the subject of the targets. That raises the question whether they would suffer discrimination under article 14 and whether the legislation is therefore incompatible with our obligation not to discriminate under article 14 in respect of their enjoyment of other convention rights.
	Our argument is not that that would be a matter of direct discrimination; it clearly would not be. However, it would constitute indirect discrimination. The example we give, which has already been mentioned, is that children from disadvantaged groups-that makes it worse; it is not children generally, but children from disadvantaged groups, such as the children of asylum seekers, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children, and children living in bed and breakfast accommodation and care homes-would not benefit under the present definition from the duty imposed on the Government to tackle child poverty according to the existing four targets, although if my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) gets his way, there will be five targets. The Joint Committee's assertion is that that would breach article 14 in respect of the enjoyment of the rights under article 1 of protocol 1, which include the right to enjoy one's possessions. There are clear examples in case law of the kind of benefits that are covered by that, and an article 8 case is also relevant.
	If that is a problem, we need to provide a solution. As my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon said, that will not be easy. It is not, however, the job of the Joint Committee to provide that solution. It is for the Government to propose it and for Parliament to amend it. The Joint Committee has, however, tabled two amendments that we believe go some way towards providing a solution. They would place a duty in the Bill for an effort to be made to ameliorate any discrimination that might, almost by necessity, follow from the use of the existing surveys.
	I shall not go through the report in detail, but it makes a number of brief arguments against the proposition that we set out in correspondence with the Government. First, we said that the Bill does not engage article 1 of protocol 1, because it sets out no specific benefits. It simply establishes a framework, and the measures in the Bill are not sufficiently determinative of any decision to allocate funds or resources to particular groups, and not therefore to others. Our view was that the measure would have to have sufficient scope of application; it would not be necessary to identify specific discrimination for article 1 of protocol 1 to be engaged.
	The question that is raised is whether the use of binding targets is sufficient to create this problem if a group is left out. We believe that there is a question of discrimination, which is not permitted, if some children are treated better than others particularly disadvantaged children such as those of asylum seekers, Gypsies and Travellers, and those living in bed and breakfast accommodation. We definitely think that that would be a problem.
	The Government have argued that no provision in the Bill would result in some children being left out, because the qualifying households will be defined in regulations. They say that there can be no argument with the Bill, because the definition will follow in the regulations. We have not accepted that argument previously, and nor have the Government, when it suits them. We state in the report:
	Our concern about the compatibility with Article 14 ECHR of excluding children not in qualifying households from the targets is not affected by the fact that qualifying households will be defined in regulations rather than in the Bill itself.
	We have made clear that if
	the provisions in a Bill are likely to give rise to a breach of a Convention right in practice, for example because of a regulation making power that is likely to be exercised in a way which is incompatible with Convention rights,
	that
	is of as much concern to us as a breach on the face of the Bill.
	The Government's third argument is that it is not the intention to discriminate against those children, and I certainly accept that the Government are of that view. Indeed, they point out that the duty to have a child poverty strategy will apply to all children; other parts of the Bill not affected by these amendments do not seek to discriminate. Although we support and welcome that, it does not solve the problem that part of the Bill does appear to discriminate against children. The fact that it is not the intention for the Bill to discriminate against them is not relevant; it is, as we say,
	enough that it is the effect of its provisions that the children covered by the targets are prioritised over those children not caught by the data.
	The fourth and final argument that we have identified the Government using is that the discrimination against children not living in qualifying households is justifiable and proportionate because it is simply not practical to conduct surveys that cover all children. We do not think that that is good enough, because we believe that efforts could be made to identify the children we are concerned about. We have made that clear in a number of places in our report.

David Simpson: I rise to speak briefly to this group of amendments. I confess that I have not been involved in the debate all along, but would like to raise just a few points.
	When it comes to the key principles and objectives of this Bill, I believe the Government's heart is in the right place, but as right hon. and hon. Members have already said, the target date of 2020 will not be achieved-it is going to be very difficult.
	Before I entered this House and became engaged in full-time politics, child poverty to me was a third world country-a country trying to develop and move on and enter western society. When I came into politics, however, I was astounded at the number of children who were living in poverty across the whole of the United Kingdom. That was a real eye-opener for me.
	I find myself in agreement with the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), who is not in his place at the moment, in much of what he said about poverty. Other Members have raised the point about finding reasons for such poverty. What is the root cause? We have heard a number of different responses to that question.
	Ten years ago, the Government pledged to eradicate child poverty within a generation. It had doubled in the preceding 20 years, and the United Kingdom had the worst child poverty record in Europe.

Graham Stuart: It is a pleasure both to follow the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson) and to participate in this debate. I shall address my remarks chiefly to new clauses 2 and 3. The hon. Gentleman and other contributors have mentioned the Government's heart being in the right place, and I think I agree with that, but there are three drivers behind this Bill, and whereas the first of them is a genuine commitment to tackling child poverty, the other two are more ignoble.
	The Bill is designed in part to distract from the Government's failure to meet the 2010-11 target, and it is also being introduced in the hope that it will serve to create the famous political dividing lines, as is characteristic of so many proposals and legislation since the current Prime Minister took office. The Bill has been introduced in the hope that the Conservatives will fall into a political trap by expressing doubts about the mechanisms it employs or its declaratory nature-or any other of a number of well-founded concerns about it. The Government hoped the Conservatives might be foolish enough to oppose the Bill so that they could be shown to be more interested in the few than the many, thus reinforcing the disgraceful and unhelpful narrative to which the Prime Minister is so dedicated. Therefore, the Government's heart is not in the right place in two out of those three aims. Furthermore, the fact that the Government are so keen to create these dividing lines prevents us from being able to talk about the fiendishly complex problem of tackling child poverty.
	I do not doubt the Government's commitment to tackling child poverty, but in the boom period that we have recently enjoyed, the low-hanging fruit in policy terms was halving child poverty, and they did not meet their target in 2005-although they missed it by a wafer-thin margin, so I will not place too much emphasis on that. They are going to miss the 2010 child poverty target as well, and they reject spending the money that the Institute for Fiscal Studies says they could spend in order to meet that target next year. Therefore, despite the fact that they made a solemn pledge, they are saying that they will not spend the £4.3 billion on transfers to ensure that they halve child poverty. They could do that, but they have decided not to, because they recognise, as all Governments must, that they have to strike a balance between all the different priorities they are addressing. Why, therefore, would a future Government be able to do that in 10 years' time, after what will doubtless be a much tougher decade than the past 10 years from a financial point of view? I therefore believe that that will not be done. The Government are setting us up for failure, and they are giving a false promise to people that eradication is in sight. I find the entire Bill deeply unsatisfactory.
	New clause 3 is tremendously useful in asking for a report, and thereby asking the Government to talk about what they are doing now-to talk about the deadline not 10 or 11 years hence, but for tackling children being brought up in deprivation today. What are the Government doing now-this month, this quarter, next quarter, all the way through to the end of the next financial year? If they oppose the new clause, they will show that they are not interested in transparency and in looking at the here and now. They will show that they are interested not in the political realities of delivering for the poorest in our society, but in playing political games so that they can welcome the clamour of support for their long-term vision. We have had a lot of long-term visions, and the long-term vision of today is that we have ended up with record numbers of young people in unemployment.
	Whenever my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) is sitting on the Front Bench, I am always minded to try to follow his lead by being less strident and more charitable-he manages to achieve that both rightly and effectively. It is, therefore, worth commenting on a few positive things the Government have done. They have invested in early child care such as the Sure Start children centres, and they have made a genuine effort to put in place early intervention, which relates to matters of interest to the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen). We must judge the outcomes of today, however, and what we now have are more NEETs-young people not in education, employment or training-than when the Government came to power.
	We should also consider the number of people who are on the very lowest incomes. When most people think about poverty, they think about the very poorest. When they have a Labour Government who say they want to eradicate child poverty, little would they imagine that that Government would be smug and proud of their record when the number of children in families on the very lowest incomes-not below 60 per cent. of median income, which is the technical description of relative poverty, but below 40 per cent. of median income-is at its highest for 25 years. That is the reality. The poorest are poorer under Labour, despite the investments and the genuineness of the commitments. Yet we have before us this vainglorious piece of legislation, which is designed to distract and to allow this failing Government, who have so often failed the poorest, to put themselves in a cloak of social justice. They do not deserve to wear it.
	All this means that we are not doing enough of what the hon. Member for Upper Bann and so many others, including the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), were talking about. We should be trying to wrestle with the complexity of these issues so that we do not create perverse incentives-those affecting the poor and the rich. We want social justice and we want effectiveness, and we want it to be provided in a humane way. We do not want to play politics with looking after the poor in a way that ends up with more of them kept that way.

Graham Stuart: I rise to speak to amendment 27, which deals with consulting families. On page 5, the Bill states:
	In preparing a UK strategy, the Secretary of State...must consult...local authorities...Scottish Ministers...such children, or organisations working with or representing children, as the Secretary of State thinks fit...and such other persons.
	Is it not odd not to mention families or the context in which children live? I would not make this allegation against the Government, but typically it is totalitarian states that try to bypass the context of the family and the parents to speak directly to children. The measure is rather odd. The Minister has tried to say that if we include families, suddenly the Secretary of State would be obliged to consult the whole of the general public, but that is obviously nonsense. The amendment would simply provide that
	Secretary of State...must consult...such children,
	families
	and organisations working with...children, as the Secretary of State thinks fit.
	We have heard from the Minister, and we will not necessarily hear from her again, unless I have misunderstood the process, but it is a pity she dismissed the proposal. If the Secretary of State does not talk to children in the context of the family, she will not be properly talking to the child. The best advocate of the child is very often the parent. It is not that we do not want to hear directly from children, but if we do not understand the position of the parent as the chief advocate as the child, we misunderstand the essence of the important relationship between the state and children in the context of their family.

Evan Harris: With the leave of the House, I will respond to the points made about amendments 35 and 36. I am grateful for the support of the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire, and I note that my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon tabled similar amendments in Committee.
	In response to the point about children's commissioners, the Minister did not give a good reason why they should not be included. They have been suggested specifically because their role is statutory and that is why they are different from the others. If we are to go to the trouble of creating through statute an organisation with expertise in being an advocate for children, it should be a statutory consultee. That is only logical, and I suspect that a similar amendment would attract widespread support in the other place for that reason.
	The Minister was concerned that amendment 36 would create a burden of consultation-a process burden. If there is a process burden, and if consultation can rightly be described as a burden-I do not think that it can-it was created by signing the UN convention on the rights of the child. Article 12 is clear in requiring states to assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the child's age and maturity. The Minister made reference to article 12 herself.

Madam Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: 32, page 13, line 12, at end add
	'which must include the number of households within the area that fail to meet the bedroom standard'.
	Amendment 30, page 14, line 38, leave out from 'of' to 'section' in line 39.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. Will hon. Members who are leaving the Chamber please do so as quickly and quietly as possible so that the Third Reading debate can take place?

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. We are discussing the Third Reading of the Child Poverty Bill and not the other legislation that the hon. Gentleman has referred to.

John Howell: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is always good to take an intervention from the other half of the duo, who will no doubt make a contribution of his own in a moment. However, my hon. Friend is quite right to point out that that is also one the legal consequences of the Bill, and I too think that it is an insult to Parliament as well.
	I am also disappointed with the way that the Government continue to treat local government. It is clear from the Bill that they do not take local authorities seriously as entities in themselves, with their own agenda and ability to deliver, but regard them as the delivery arm of Whitehall.
	Today is not the end of the matter with this Bill, as there is a huge pile of regulation and, even more worryingly, guidance to be issued to local authorities. All I shall ask of the Minister today is that she please take note of the evidence sessions and the comments made by witnesses. What is required from the Government when it comes to regulation and guidance is a light touch, if any touch at all. Many local authorities are already doing a good job in respect of child poverty, as was illustrated by the evidence to the Committee from Kent and Liverpool in particular. So please let us see in the guidance a recognition of the best practice that already exists.
	I asked one of the witnesses what difference the Bill would make and whether it would make a big impact, because one of them had said that something pretty big needed to happen in the field of child poverty. I asked:
	Is that something going to happen as a result of the delivery mechanisms set out in the Bill?
	Neil O'Brien from Policy Exchange answered that negatively in terms of the delivery mechanisms and the aims in the Bill. It is interesting to read what he said next:
	you are not going to be voting in this place on the strategy and all of those things-
	the big picture things-
	you are voting on just a target that is very much focused on central Government and everything they are doing. So, in answer to your previous question, there is a complete mismatch. --[ Official Report, Child Poverty Public Bill Committee, 22 October 2009; c. 110, Q21.]
	That is a great shame.
	The Bill could have shown greater ambition and taken us a lot further down the road towards eradicating child poverty. Instead, we have had the perversion of the English language, whereby eradication no longer means eradication in the sense that the rest of us would use the word. I hope that, with a change of Government, we will get a strategy for child poverty that is much more focused on delivering real change for children and particularly the families in which they live.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that we are debating the Bill on Third Reading, which should be about the Bill's contents.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. Could I remind the hon. Member that we are not repeating a Second Reading debate? I have given him some latitude, and I would now ask him to concentrate his remarks on the Third Reading of this particular Bill.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. May I remind the hon. Member that there will no doubt be an opportunity to discuss the pre-Budget report, but that now it is the Third Reading of the Bill?

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I hope that the hon. Gentleman is not going to be tempted to stray into a very different debate from the one that we are currently dealing with.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I understand that the hon. Gentleman is again responding to an intervention, but may I remind him that we are debating the Third Reading of this Bill, not any future Bill?